Publication: A Negotiation of Belonging

As we close GLORY BOX at Sadie Coles The Shop, we’re sharing something that lived alongside the exhibition: a short publication titled A Negotiation of Belonging.

This text-based counterpart grew out of conversations between the artists and ourselves as the show came together. Where the exhibition unfolded in material form, the publication gathers words, fragments, and reflections around the themes we circled: working within a commercial art setting, negotiating identity and belonging, and the care that underpins showing work at all.

We spoke about how people’s reasons for being artists were never about wanting to, but about having to - a deep compulsion that existed even before we knew what becoming an artist fully meant. That urgency shaped the writings collected here.

“We are not trying to do anything crazy, just documenting a moment.”

Curation, for us, has always meant more than formalities, more than putting works on the wall or fitting into market rhythms. It is an act of care, conversation, and presence. The artists’ texts carry this through: from meditations on labour and survival, to the dissonance of assimilation, to the fragile balance between life, death, and desire.

Grace Clifford writes through fragments of labour, inheritance, and restless desire.

Harley Roberts reflects on death and life as overlapping states, painting as a witness to that paradox.

Kelly Wu navigates assimilation, dual belonging, and the destabilising cycles of routine, identity, and performance.

Threaded throughout are our shared discussions: about appearing polished, fitting in, about class, immigration, professionalism, and the ways we camouflage to be taken seriously. About doing this work because we need to. Because we’ve been called to.

The publication is not an ending, but a document. A way to hold the conversations that made GLORY BOX what it was. A negotiation, unfinished and ongoing, about what it means to belong in these spaces.